SIRIUS European policy network, which joins ministries of education, local authorities, research groups and representatives of civil society among Europe, serves the purpose to innovate in governance processes of national education systems in order to guarantee the equality of children and youngsters with migrant background in education.
SIRIUS promotes collaboration between policy makers, researchers and practitioners to facilitate the exchange of ideas and the transfer of information and knowledge as crucial innovative strategy to improve policies addressed to the management of a national education system more equitable and inclusive. SIRIUS wants to become a European lobby to boost policies for children and youngsters with a migrant background.
Moreover, SIRIUS wants to contribute to knowledge transfer between countries, and between different national agents (policy makers, researchers, practitioners), about the processes of development and implementation of innovative policies in education and migration; as well as, to experiment improvement practices of governance at national level that allow to eradicate the inequality of education results between children and youngster with migrant background and their native peers.
Nowadays SIRIUS policy network has 35 national partners from 16 European countries and wants to grow in number and quality. It also counts on guidance of 6 of the most important research institutes on this issue at European and international level.
The topics of this Workshop, which is held in Vilnius, are: (1) Discuss the state-of-art of host language/mother tongue acquisition approaches in Europe; (2) Clarify the role of various stakeholders in language support policies; (3) Establish best practices and universal approaches in providing teaching of languages of the host country and respecting the languages of the country of origin; and (4) Assess possibilities of their transferability to different countries.